The Tragic Death of Mark Baumer, a Prolific Poet and Environmental Activist for the Social-Media Age

Baumer was walking across the country barefoot to build awareness of climate change and water shortages when he was struck and killed by an S.U.V.

Photograph Courtesy The Baumer Family

The writer and activist Mark Baumer, who died this week, at the age of thirty-three, was a compulsive social-media diarist. He produced tens of entries each day on a mess of online platforms, posting poems, photographs, videos of prank calls, minutes-long collages of his daily activities. On his Web site, he published lists of everything he read—in the first twenty days of 2017, his list included “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” by Marie Kondo, and “The Pale King,” by David Foster Wallace—and excerpts from the fifty-odd books of prose and poetry he produced, the majority of which he self-published. He also used the Internet, cannily, to document his environmental activism. In 2010, he kept a blog as he walked across America, in eighty-one days, generating as little waste as possible. For his latest protest, begun in October, 2016, he set out walking across the country again, this time barefoot, from the East Coast to the West, to build awareness of climate change and water shortages, and to raise funds for a Providence-based environmental group. At about 1:15 P.M. last Saturday, Baumer was walking westward along the shoulder of Highway 90 in Walton County, Florida, when he was struck by an S.U.V. and killed. He was wearing a high-visibility vest at the time, and walking against the traffic, in accordance with safety conventions. (The Florida Highway Patrol has said that the driver will face charges.)

Baumer had become an Internet cult figure in recent years, though his following never matched his prolific output. He grew up in Durham, Maine, an athlete and a straight-edge kid on the punk scene. After graduating from Wheaton College, he earned an M.F.A. in fiction from Brown. In recent years, he had been a workers’-union steward and a librarian, and he taught a fiction class at Brown, in 2011, that the students found polarizing, in part because of his encouragement of what he called “the art of subtle weirdness.” Before beginning his latest trek, he won a poetry fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. Last October, in the first video he posted of his trip, Baumer filmed each of the handful of items he’d be carrying with him, among them an absentee ballot from the state of Rhode Island. He began in Providence and headed South—early videos show him walking through New York, his bare feet padding through Times Square. He wanted to go through Kentucky, but in Ohio the weather turned icy and walking barefoot became impossible, not because of the snow but because the calcium-chloride de-icing salts that were sprinkled on the concrete cut his feet. So he veered south, taking a bus to Florida to find a matching lateral point, and continued his walk. He started off staying in motels at night, but when that started to feel indulgent he slept outside, finding places like churchyards and baseball-field dugouts in the towns he passed through.

On his walk across country, Baumer posted photos, videos, poems, and blog posts daily. Photograph Courtesy The Baumer Family

Photograph Courtesy The Baumer Family

Since November 9th, many Americans have been searching for ways to incorporate political activism into their everyday lives, to get out of the echo chambers that keep them among only like-minded people. Baumer was an eccentric model for both, someone for whom activism was both a life style and a form of self-expression. He walked through tiny highway-side towns and filmed himself interacting with locals, and often spoke on his feeds about how surprisingly good the people he encountered were. Baumer’s friend Blake Butler said that he would “walk through the small weird bedrock towns, they would ask him what he was doing … then they would look at his feet and offer him a pair of shoes.” Baumer has said that he was sometimes offered several pairs a day, by people who slowed their cars down and opened the driver’s-side window. “He would explain he didn’t need them.”

Butler met Baumer in 2008, after Butler published some of Baumer’s writing in the online literary magazines he worked for. “He was a great sentence writer, he destroyed sentences,” Butler told me. “He had to break up everything that was in front of him. I know he was capable of writing conventional things that people would take seriously, but that didn’t interest him.” A short story that Baumer published in BOMB magazine in 2013, called “Yachts,” is narrated by an infant whose penis abandons him to go to South America, leaving behind a note that reads “I want to be a fascist dictator, I want it all.” The penis travels the world, sending postcards back. A bamboo forest is killed off, and the penis develops a taste for corporate takeovers. The story ends as the narrator is left alone to paraphrase his father’s thesis on postcolonialism into a tape recorder. BOMB magazine has the story tagged as “experimental writing,” but it’s one of Baumer’s more traditionally literary pieces, with the same sweet, funny, hopeful absurdism that characterizes his other work.

Like almost everything Baumer published, “Yachts” was interspersed with photos from his life: a truck parked in front of a suburban home, a cat drinking out of a toilet. On his walk across country, he posted photos, videos, poems, and blog posts daily, swinging the camera from his face to the road while talking about what he saw. He often picked up discarded objects along the side of the road. On January 12th, day ninety-one of his journey, he found a worksheet from what he guessed was a Bible-study class, educating its subjects about social-media use. His videos were intercut by rants about the political causes he was obsessed by—access to clean water, the degradation of the environment, social discrimination. His style was to yell into the camera, in a voice reminiscent of Andy Kaufman, or of a sardonic game-show host.

These antics often seemed like a way of staving off the boredom and loneliness of his travels. (“Sometimes because of my bare feet and the lack of daily human contact I feel like a ghost,” he wrote in one posting, over a photo of his shadow cast across the yellow stripe of a two-lane highway.) He started an e-mail address in Joe Biden’s name, and got questions and complaints sent to it. On pages of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” he made careful rips in the pages, to expose photographs he had laid underneath, like a Max Ernst collage, and then circled phrases on the page, with a sharpie, joining them to other random phrases to create new mini-narratives: “I am so ready to celebrate / a decent restaurant”; “the very safe neighborhood / was attacked by / a totally safe neighborhood.” “Activism can be so self-serious,” Butler told me. “But Mark had no fear, and he pushed everything toward ridiculousness.” One of Baumer's social-media signatures was pictures of the soles of his worn feet, taken with the camera positioned in front of him on the ground so that his head and torso were visible in the background. His father told me, "We would look at his online presence and be piecing him together bit by bit."

Baumer had just completed his hundredth day on foot, on January 21st, when he broadcast his final video, from DeFuniak Springs, Florida. It is made in his slightly maniacal style of time-lapse collage, joining seconds-long clips of his day to form a three-minute video. He shoots the patch of Astro-Turf he had slept on the night before, yells commentary at two men playing golf on the other side of a railroad track. When it starts raining, he debates whether to keep walking, then pulls on a plastic hood, looks at the camera, and says, “We have a President who does not believe in climate change.” As his monologue continues, he passes a Trump supporter on the other side of the road, who yells at him. He finds a cassette on the road, passes an imitation Bel Air mansion in the middle of a field. The video cuts out unexpectedly just as he starts screaming, though it’s not clear at whom. It’s nighttime; his hair looks damp, and his high-visibility vest reflects right back into his phone’s camera.